


Stroll

by yeaka



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 12:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1940988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeaka/pseuds/yeaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some nights are harder than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stroll

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Прогулка](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2678453) by [kaiSSa666](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaiSSa666/pseuds/kaiSSa666)



> A/N: Written for the lovely coyotl’s prompt: “Capt Janeway can't sleep sometimes. Some nights the sense of distance between wherever they are and whatever they used to think of as home looms so large that she can't even close her eyes. So she walks. And on those nights, more often than not, she ends up in the same place with the company of the same person. Who is it that she spends those darkest moments with, what do they do? And what do these moments mean to each of them?”
> 
> Disclaimer: I don’t own Star Trek or any of its contents, and I’m not making any money off this.

It’s another of those nights, and for a moment, she thinks of tapping the badge on her side table, calling Seven and whispering, “ _Tonight_.”

But she’s never done that before, and that might spoil the magic. 

She lies in bed, at first. Rolls onto her back and stares at the grey ceiling through the dull, pale blue light that filters over her slanted headboard. She didn’t close the blinds—never does—and the stars outside were comforting once, but aren’t at times like this. Kathryn closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see them. She tries to meditate—like Tuvok taught her—but she’s no Vulcan and never will be. She visits the gecko in her head and it has nothing to say. She exhales and tells herself, despite what her body’s telling her, that coffee will only make it worse; keep her up all hours, keep this... _problem_ in her head. It’s an issue she’s worked on too many times for any of the solutions to matter at times like this, where it’s not so much an overwhelming panic as just a gentle, lulling, sense of depressing failure. 

She gives in and slips out of bed, the covers crinkling noisily behind her. She pads across her quarters in bare feet and considers wandering the halls in her nightgown, then snorts—how appropriate would that be? Uniform slacks and the appropriate grey-purple undershirt; that’s better. She changes through her yawn and finger-combs her hair back, messed up as it always is from sleep. Or what little of it she got. She turns to the replicator and has _coffee_ on her tongue but finally settles for water.

It tastes bland and she ends up dumping half the glass. Her eyes glance at the mirror on her way out, but she doesn’t pause long enough to really process the information. She’ll be fine. Always is. If she looks anything less, then, well...

She isn’t _really_ , anyway. But no one ever tells their captain that. 

The halls of Voyager are dark and quiet, the half-lighting simulating the night of a planet still some odd fifty years away. She passes a few gamma-shift officers as she goes, mostly ensigns, mostly either too busy or tired to do more than a courtesy smile that she returns half heartedly. She’s just wandering. She’s sure, to them, it seems like she’s striding with purpose—she’s been told she _always_ looks like that—but in reality, moving is just another thing to do. She heads towards the mess hall, decides better of it, considers checking on the bridge, but doesn’t want to look at and feel guilty over and talk to all the familiar faces. She considers the cargo bay and still ends up going where she always goes. 

She isn’t surprised when she reaches the holodeck and it tells her, quite calmly, as though it isn’t impossibly far away from all other ships of its own kind, that a program’s already running. Kathryn isn’t particularly surprised. She used to run it herself. For the first few times, it was always her. But... it’s been more often than that, and she isn’t always first anymore. 

She wonders, not for the first time, if her star pupil’s hacked some sort of monitoring device into her quarters, then dismisses it with a snort. It’s not that she’d put that sort of thing past Seven so much as she’s convinced Tuvok would’ve discovered such a bug by now. 

She steps through the self-opening doors and onto the honey-sweet air of an Indiana field. The crunch of the grass beneath her feet is a nasty shock, one she should really be past by now; it feels so very much like _home_. She’s glad she put her shoes on; the dew between her toes would’ve been too much. 

She wanders past the arch, and it disappears into the night sky, clear and blue-purple and so bitterly homesick. Kathryn has to half force her feet forward, and the rest of her is dragged by that invisible force that whispers _home_ on the barely-there wind. 

Down the slope of the field, she can see a little wooden cottage—a rarity in their day and age—so like the one she used to visit on vacations every summer. A speck of light brown flickers back and forth around the short fence that surrounds it, too far away to decipher, but she thinks she can hear a dog’s bark in the distance— _animals,_ as she knows them—she’s missed that—that one in particular. 

She misses so much, but the heartache is a good burn, and she takes her seat on the sloping green anyway, slicking her uniform up a few centimeters. The nights just after the rain are the most beautiful; everything seems to shimmer. 

Seven of Nine, already sitting and watching the unmoving home below, mumbles a quiet, “Captain.” Borg acknowledgement. The sentiment’s somewhere underneath, and Kathryn’s glad she’s learned to decipher it. She doesn’t want to be a captain at times like this; just a member of the crew, longing for something lost, like all of them. 

Seven doesn’t remember any of this, of course. For all Kathryn knows, she never even visited Kathryn’s home state. Kathryn will show her, someday. 

For now, they sit in the open air, and Seven reaches beside her to pull fabric from a basket; she’s started coming prepared. It isn’t like when this first happened; Kathryn torturing herself with reminiscing and her favourite ex-drone wandering in. They’re prepared, now. There are procedures. Always procedures. With Seven, Kathryn doesn’t mind; she knows it helps Seven function better. Seven doesn’t _care_ if they ever get home, and that’s... something of a comfort. 

Seven passes the edge of the navy-blue blanket over and informs Kathryn, “I observed this in pictures.”

“Pictures?” Kathryn asks, quirking a smile and an eyebrow as she takes the offered blanket. She shuffles closer to Seven, also cross-legged but too rigid, and drapes her end of the blanket over her shoulders. 

“Research,” Seven clarifies. She pauses as she arranges her own end around herself, though her hesitation’s for another reason. Kathryn knows her well enough to see the struggle in being both efficient and... human. Seven might do well on Vulcan. “It seemed prudent to enhance our enjoyment.” And she looks at Kathryn with that _look_ that on a shier woman might be a question, but on Seven is sort of a push-and-pull anomaly. 

Kathryn tells her, “Well done,” and finds satisfaction in Seven’s nod. Seven returns to the basket to retrieve the rest of its contents: a container and two mugs. She passes one to Kathryn, then opens the canister and pours a thick, dark-brown liquid, teaming hot. When Kathryn brings it to her lips and blows, she can tell it’s hot chocolate. Authentic, not holo. The hologram wouldn’t make it so hot. Seven would. Seven pours her own and puts the rest back in the basket, pushing it away. 

Then it’s just the two of them and warmth in her hands and side and the crisp midnight air, so very close to how it used to be. 

Kathryn tells herself that she didn’t have this shoulder-to-sigh-on back then, and it does make things easier. The sugar will keep her up, but the memories and company would’ve anyway. They sit in silence before they start to talk, and when Kathryn finally slips her arm around Seven’s back, she knows that a piece of the Delta Quadrant is her home, too.


End file.
